After the Battle of the Royal Capital, under the new queen’s decree, the Restoration Army and artisans had thrown themselves fully into repairing the capital and its surrounding areas.
Just over ten days had passed, and the Southern District had completely transformed.
Farmers recruited from the Golden Tassel Plain, aided by the Merchant Alliance’s golems, used shovels and carts to haul the rubble and debris piled on the streets out of the city, one cartload at a time, working with fervor even in the winter cold.
The collapsed ruins of buildings were cleared away, the broken streets were repaved, and the surviving houses had their roofs and walls reinforced.
Artisans coated the walls with fresh white lime plaster, covering the blasphemous demonic symbols beneath thick layers of chalk.
The battlements atop the city walls once again flew the flag of the White Horse Kingdom. The blue banner flapped and cracked in the cold wind, its winged horse emblem looking especially vivid against the lead-gray sky of the northern lands.
Louisa had originally planned to plant the flag of the Slime United Empire alongside it, but the new emperor had just been crowned, and the new banner was still being woven and crafted in the Dark Realm. It would take at least half a month to be delivered by merchant caravan.
It had been snowing constantly for the past few days.
Winter’s snow in the north came fast and fierce. The lead-gray clouds rolled in from the direction of the northern ice fields, blanketing the entire sky tightly.
The snow, whipped by the wind, slammed horizontally into people’s faces. Fine ice crystals rustled against armor with a soft *sh-sh-sh* sound, quickly forming a thin white layer on the stone slabs as they landed.
But even several days of heavy snow couldn’t fill the massive crater in the Western District.
The wound left by that silver sword light—which had shaved dozens of meters off the entire Western District—still lay gaping and exposed.
Whenever patrol soldiers passed by the edge of the crater, they would unconsciously slow down. Some would even stop, standing at the rim to stare down for a while, recalling the shock that silver light had brought.
The difficulty of repairing the crater was immense.
Filling a pit hundreds of meters in diameter and tens of meters deep required an astronomical amount of earth and stone.
The kingdom’s treasurer had run the numbers multiple times during the meeting, but the conclusion was always the same: spending those gold coins on filling the crater was far less urgent than repairing the farmsteads and fields in the Golden Tassel Plain that had been burned by the demons.
Food, coal, building materials, supplies for winter—every single item was more pressing than filling the pit.
Queen Louisa had signed off on the report, agreeing to prioritize limited resources for civilian recovery.
It was easy to predict that when the Winter Year passed, the summer rains would fill the crater. Though the northern summer was short, melted snow combined with the rainy season’s precipitation would be enough to let deep water accumulate at the bottom.
By then, this former battlefield would become a natural lake. Maybe, when Her Majesty was in a good mood, she would stock it with some fish fry.
A few years later, reeds and water plants would grow along the lake’s edge, and waterfowl would come to nest there. By that time, soldiers who had fought in the war could point to the lake and tell incoming immigrants, “See, this used to be the Western District of the capital.”
And then enjoy the shocked expressions on those immigrants’ faces.
The restoration of the capital was proceeding methodically. The entire city was like a massive beast slowly awakening from serious injury—its breathing was still weak, but at least it had begun to move.
However, the changes here had plunged a visiting guest from afar into deep contemplation.
An owl was circling beneath the clouds on the horizon.
Its body was several times larger than any natural owl. When its wings were fully spread, they almost matched the length of a warhorse.
Its feathers were pitch-black like ink, and its eyes were amber, with the ruined, smoking city below reflected in its pupils.
Someone was sitting on the owl’s back.
After leaving the Astral Plane, Agrel had teleported directly to the north. Following the charred white trail along the Golden Tassel Plain, he had flown northward, intending to first check on the situation in the White Horse Golden Radiance.
Before coming, he had read the northern brief in the Council’s archives. It said: “Demons have occupied the White Horse Golden Radiance. The legendary warlock Slimek has been crowned with the Soul Crown.”
The tone of the brief was urgent, as if urging the Council to act quickly.
He had prepared himself for the worst—a city completely overrun by demons, burning houses, piles of corpses, human limbs hanging from the walls, demons patrolling the streets, all survivors enslaved or sacrificed.
But that’s not what he saw.
He saw a small number of humans and dwarf artisans still working in the snowy weather, standing shoulder to shoulder on scaffolding to repair the city wall. He saw patrols of the Restoration Army riding warhorses through the city gates and into the snowstorm, their hooves leaving a neat line of prints in the snow...
Hadn’t the brief said a demon had advanced to Legendary and occupied the north?
Where were the demons?
Agrel remained silent for a long time, simply letting his shadow owl continue circling above the capital.
This owl was a magical pet he had found and contracted with in some strange shadow plane within the Astral Realm. It possessed the innate talent of “Avoid Detection,” making it nearly impossible to be spotted by any divination or detection spells.
He usually relied on this ability to travel between planes, avoiding being targeted by unknown Astral creatures. He wasn’t worried about the people below discovering him.
Besides, as a Legendary mage and a representative figure of the Conjuration School in the Dawnlands, he held little fear of this land. Even if he were discovered, it wouldn’t matter. Still, he preferred this method of covert observation.
It allowed him to observe the true customs and culture, not fearful reverence.
The owl circled once more beneath the clouds.
Agrel gazed down at the massive crater. Snow was still falling, and the charred, hardened crust at the bottom stood out starkly against the white cover.
He carefully examined the cross-sections of rock at the crater’s edge, which had been melted by intense heat and then solidified. The glassy sheen on them reflected a cold light in the sunlight—a typical trace left by a momentary impact of extremely high temperature.
It didn’t seem like the effect of a demon’s flame magic, as there was no smell of sulfur.
Someone had stopped Casaric.
He confirmed this judgment in his mind.
The capital was battered, but the flag of the White Horse Kingdom flew from the city walls. Patrol soldiers walked the streets. Merchants unloaded goods in the squares. Artisans worked on repairs inside the city.
This city was not ruled by demons. It had been reclaimed and was being rebuilt. So where was Casaric? The demon called “the new emperor of the north” in the brief—where was he now?
His gaze fell back on the massive crater.
For such a scale of destruction to be left in the capital, the one who defeated Casaric was no ordinary Legendary expert. They might not even be human.
Conventional Legendary spells rarely left such large-scale, physical traces of destruction on the Material Plane.
Who could it be?
Agrel patted the feathers of the owl beneath him. The owl silently folded its wings, descending to a lower altitude, beginning to skim over the capital at a closer distance to the ground.
As the owl flew lower, he could see more clearly.
In an alley in the Southern District, several green slimes were moving a pile of bricks recovered from the ruins. The bricks were stacked together by the slimes, then swallowed into their bodies, moving forward in sync with their bouncing.
At the end of the alley, another slime was squatting in front of a half-collapsed wall. It extended a gel hand and pressed it against the broken section of the wall. Mana flowed from its body, and the bricks of the broken wall began to re-adhere. The cracks healed at a visible rate.
Next to it, a human mason was directing with a level, shouting, “A little higher on the left, yeah, right there.” The slime responded with a gurgle and adjusted the brick to the correct angle.
Agrel stared at that slime repairing the wall for a good while, his brow slightly furrowing.
From a high altitude, he had mistaken those colorful spots for debris or decorations, but only now did he realize they were clearly living slimes.
Where did slimes come from in a Winter Year?
He knew all too well how cold the northern winter was. The icy wind here was enough to freeze ordinary slime gel solid. A single night of heavy snow could turn a slime exposed outdoors into a stiff lump of gel.
According to the standard classification of swamp biology, only a few slimes that had evolved frost affinity could survive winter. Their gel would turn a light blue, with a thin layer of frost on the surface—not these vibrant colors.
He wanted to tell himself he was seeing things, but the facts were right in front of him.
Not only were these slimes hopping around outdoors in a Winter Year, but they were also repairing houses alongside human artisans.
He saw a human mason pull a Warm Stone from his pocket and hand it to a nearby squatting slime. The slime took the Warm Stone, gurgled, and stored it in its body to absorb the heat, then continued focusing on repairing the wall.
The whole process was as natural as a daily exchange between two coworkers, without a trace of coercion or fear.
Humans and magical creatures coexisting harmoniously, and these slimes seemed no different from people. They used tools, they cast spells, they followed instructions to complete complex construction tasks, displaying clear social organization.
This piqued his interest.
Something astonishing must have happened in the north that the Dawnlands knew nothing about, and it might be related to these slimes.
He rapidly flipped through his mental map of the continent’s known magical creature distribution. Slimes were the most common low-level magical creatures in swamps, found in any damp region of the continent. But they had never shown any signs of intelligence, let alone spellcasting ability or a sense of social division of labor.
Unless some force was driving them from behind.
Could there be an epic-tier magical creature in the Corrupted Miasma Mountains?
Some magical creatures could awaken intelligence through bloodline evolution or external stimuli, then rapidly establish their own clans and territories.
What if this epic-tier magical creature had driven these slimes to repair the city here and had used some method to evolve these low-level slimes into intelligent servants?
This guess was quite absurd, but Agrel’s intuition told him it might be the closest answer to the truth.
He had originally planned to fly to the Corrupted Miasma Mountains to see the true form of that epic-tier magical creature—whether it was a giant dragon, a colossal golem, or an elemental lord.
Anyone capable of defeating a legendary demon should at least be at the epic level.
But Casaric’s whereabouts kept his mind unsettled.
A demon advancing to Legendary, even if defeated, would not die easily. The evil power of the Abyss granted it a vitality far more tenacious than that of ordinary beings.
As long as it remained on the Material Plane, it could always make a comeback.
He decided to set aside the matter of the epic-tier magical creature for now and deal with Casaric first.
Perhaps he could meet that demon in the Burning Capital, defeat it completely, or banish it back to the Abyss.
This was the Council’s responsibility to the Material Plane, and also the duty he, as a Legendary mage of the Material Plane, should naturally undertake.
Agrel patted the magical pet beneath him, then raised his staff. The gem at the tip glowed faintly—a very weak light, well swallowed by the gloomy snowy sky.
[Teleportation]
The owl flapped its wings, and its massive, pitch-black body turned in the air, flying westward.
The staff’s light flashed around it, and both the bird and the rider vanished into the gray sky.
Because he wasn’t familiar with the geography of the north, Agrel had to teleport several times to adjust his direction.
Each time he landed, he had the owl fly up again to reassess the terrain.
The snowy mountains to the west, the course of the river across the Golden Tassel Plain—he used these landmarks to correct his position bit by bit. Finally, the owl’s wings crossed the last mountain ridge, and the land below suddenly darkened.
It was as if the light had been cut off with a knife.
The bright daylight sky completely vanished on this side of the ridge, replaced by a perpetual twilight-like gloom.
There was no sun above, no clouds, only a thick layer of gray-black dense mist shrouding the entire sky and land, visibility reduced to less than a hundred meters.
Many such Dark Realms existed on the continent, most of them related to the Shadow Mountains.
Agrel was no stranger to them. Several similar areas existed in the south, and even deep beneath the Dawnlands, there was a small patch of shadow-contaminated ruins.
He had originally thought traveling through this pitch-black land would be troublesome.
No sunlight, no starlight, the chaotic mana field making it easy to lose one’s sense of direction—even a Legendary mage could end up wandering in circles in such a region for most of a day.
That was until he saw the crisscrossing roads beneath the gloomy sky.
Those roads emitted a white light. The surfaces were smooth and wide, enough for two wagons to pass side by side. Stone pillars stood at intervals on both sides, their tops embedded with glowing, unknown crystals.
Most of the roads ran east-west, with very clear directions. Every few miles, a fork appeared, marked by a faded wooden signpost that wrote the name of the next stop and its distance in the Common Tongue and Demi-human language.
It wasn’t the roads themselves that caught his attention, but the camps along them.
Along every road, makeshift relay stations made of wood and tent cloth could be seen. Wagons were parked in the camps, bonfires blazed, and people rested or fed draft animals.
Among those figures were not only humans but also dwarves, and also those slimes he had already seen in the capital.
They were squatting by the bonfires to keep warm. Some were absorbing Warm Stones as lunch. Others were rubbing against each other with their gel to clean themselves. Still others were talking with human merchants.
Though he couldn’t hear what they were saying, from the merchants’ beaming expressions, these conversations were clearly quite pleasant.
Slimes again.
These weren’t the ones from the capital. There were so many of them that they were spread across the entire transportation network of this Dark Realm.
They weren’t an occasional, isolated phenomenon. On this land, they had already formed a complete community.
Agrel suddenly realized that these slimes might not be just enslaved magical creatures.
They possessed sufficient intelligence. They could use the Common Tongue. They could execute complex commands. They might have even participated in building the roads.
An enslaver wouldn’t allow their servants to operate with such independence—unless these slimes were themselves free.
But how could magical creatures evolve such intelligence on their own?
A ridiculous thought flashed through the depths of his mind.
What if that epic-tier magical creature was actually a legendary slime?
But he quickly drove the thought from his head.
A legendary slime?
That was even more absurd than the idea of dragons collectively turning vegetarian.
He had seen countless strange creatures in the Astral Realm—crystal snails larger than houses, void jellyfish that could devour dreams, even an ancient octopus that disguised itself as a spatial fissure.
But a legendary slime? Even the Astral Realm had no such thing.
It seemed he had spent too long in the Astral Realm, seen too many strange things, and had returned to the Material Plane thinking of legendary status upon seeing slightly smarter slimes.
Agrel shook his head in self-mockery and stopped dwelling on the issue.
He continued teleporting westward along the glowing roads. Each time he landed, he chose a spot near the camps at road intersections to ensure he wouldn’t deviate from his direction.
Soon, he reached the borderlands of the Dark Realm.
He remembered that this area used to have an ancient vampire castle. A certain vampire duke, who had defected from the Shadow Mountains to this place, had spent centuries building a stone fortress. But the sight before him completely overturned his memory.
The spires of the vampire castle still stood on the original hill, but the cemetery surrounding the castle had been transformed into a massive field of glowing mushrooms.
No, perhaps it was more appropriate to call it a city.
A mushroom city?
The changes here were truly strange.
But Agrel had no time to linger. He patted the owl’s neck, signaling it to continue westward.
After crossing the borderlands of the Dark Realm, the climate began to change drastically.
The cold wind was left behind. The air grew warmer and more humid. The sky brightened again. Sunlight streamed through gaps in the clouds, shining on lush forests and winding rivers.
This meant he had entered the Golden Radiance Valley.
But soon, Agrel’s brow furrowed.
On the horizon in the distance, a column of black smoke was rising from a location between the forest and the river, rolling up toward the sky, dyeing the clear skyline of the Golden Radiance Valley a murky gray-black.
The source of the smoke was a city. Its city gates were half-collapsed, and the flag on the wall had been burned to a single half-scorched strip of black cloth, hanging limp and powerless in the wind stirred up by the heat waves.
Agrel caught a familiar scent.
Sulfur.
The sulfurous smell of the Abyss, mixed with the scents of burning pine and charred flesh, billowed out from the distant city, carried to his nose by the warm wind of the Golden Radiance Valley.
The demon legion had entered the city.
Emerald City.
One of the oldest city-states in the Golden Radiance Valley, famous for its jade mines and jewelry workshops, once the second-largest jewelry trading partner of the southern kingdoms. It was now engulfed in flames.
Citizens were already pouring out through the collapsed city gates, fleeing blindly into the forest outside the city.
They were mostly untrained civilians, wearing pajamas blackened by smoke, clutching one or two hastily grabbed items in their arms.
This torrent of people pushed and jostled each other. Some turned back to grab slow-moving elders behind them, but most no longer had time to look back.
The Extraordinary professionals who had stayed in the city were fighting back with all their might.
Casaric walked down the burning street, leaning on his shadow staff. His shadow stretched long across the ground beside him, trailing behind like a black cloak.
Occasionally, flying debris hurtled toward him, but before it could even touch the hem of his robe, it was pulverized into dust by an invisible barrier of mana that surrounded him.
He produced a thick codex and opened its pages toward the alleyways.
A low hum issued from the pages. The bodies that had already fallen in pools of blood gave off translucent souls. Among the still-fleeing civilians, a few suddenly went limp, their souls forcibly torn from their bodies as they collapsed.
Wails of anguish flooded in from all directions, then were all pulled between the pages by the codex’s powerful traction force.
The souls writhed and struggled within the pages, transparent faces stacking one over another, appearing and disappearing, until countless anguished souls were absorbed into the book. Then the codex closed shut.
A flicker of pleasure shone in Casaric’s eyes.
The fire at the end of the street still burned, but there were no more sounds of the living. Even the hounds tied to the wooden stakes had stopped barking at some unknown point.
Morrigan’s shadow slid down from a burning wall and quietly attached itself to Casaric’s feet.
“My liege, there are no more living souls in Emerald City,” Morrigan said, his tone somewhat respectful.
“Let’s go. It’s time to meet our old friend.” Casaric tucked the codex inside his cloak, struck the ground with his staff, and the shadow at its base spread out, enveloping several nearby demons that were tearing at corpses. The demons froze in place, turning into hollow-eyed puppets.
He turned and walked eastward.
Behind him, the demon legion converged from the still-burning ruins. The entire legion flowed like a viscous black-red pus, surging eastward along the ancient road of the city-state.
That direction was clear: the Dark Realm, the border of the Slime Kingdom.
From high above, Agrel took in the entire scene.
The shadow owl circled above the smoke column, its innate “Avoid Detection” talent making his presence as transparent as air.
He could indeed intervene now. He could fly down and intercept Casaric before the demon legion left the Golden Radiance Valley.
But his hand, gripping the staff, remained motionless for a long time.
Casaric was no ordinary legendary demon.
He was a demon warlock, the most sinister type of caster in the Abyss, and highly likely to possess high-level evil spells Agrel had never seen before.
That pitch-black staff was clearly some kind of high-tier shadow artifact, possibly granted to him or acquired through some pact.
He also had the Soul Crown’s enhancement, and thousands of soul fragments had massively replenished his mana reserves in a short time.
An enemy like this required even a Legendary mage to proceed with caution.
Perhaps it was better not to strike for now.
Since some powerful being had already defeated Casaric in the White Horse capital, it meant the north still had enough strength to oppose the demon.
As an outsider, proactively assessing the situation and using available information and power to avoid unnecessary direct confrontation was a common strategy for a mage.
If that unknown epic-tier magical creature had managed to defeat Casaric once, perhaps there was a way to resist him.
At the very least, let him see clearly what trump cards Casaric would reveal in a real fight before making his next judgment.
The shadow owl silently folded its wings and chased the direction of the demon legion’s movement, flying eastward.